Summer Sons(118)

“Go check there—I’ll cover these.” Andrew directed Riley with a gesture to the far shelves.

Riley began to run his own flashlight over spines of books. Andrew inspected novels and collections of poems, children’s books, all the Fulton family’s gathered texts from their rich and awful life. Then, on impulse, he lifted the light to the topmost shelf for a flash of titles: The Oldest Ways and The Ruined Gods, Witchcraft in Salem, and more. The predictability might’ve been comical if it hadn’t stoked his crippling terror higher with each passing second. But alongside the fear came a worse impulse: interest, the temptation to give in. If Sam rejected him again, if this bought him nothing, he’d lose the last connection he had to Eddie and to his line.

That thought—wasn’t his. But it prompted his hand to pet across the looming books without his consent. He snatched his hand to his chest again as the hair rose on his nape. The remembered bitter sweetness of Troth’s soul clogged the base of his throat.

“Change of plans. We need to get rid of all this. Burn it,” he said. Otherwise I might stop resisting. And would the Fultons have collected information on willfully relinquishing their power, anyway?

“Let me take a couple of those books, I’ve never seen them before,” Riley said.

“No—no, but I’ll give you the research I’ve already got. For your dissertation. Just not these, we don’t need to keep these,” he rambled, tense as a hunting dog on point.

The house groaned again, purposeful. The cellar under the floorboards offered a barbed, engaging promise of more more more, as if there were bones buried there calling for him to come pay tribute. The haunt slavered in response. His power wanted to become stronger; he struggled to keep his feet from moving closer to the shelves again. He was not as in control of the situation as he’d hoped.

“Andrew?” Riley whispered uneasily.

With a herculean effort he turned himself toward the door and gasped out, “Run.”

Riley bolted fast as a rabbit, and he followed at a pell-mell stagger out of the library, into the rotted foyer, and out the broken window again. Andrew tripped over his own feet in the grass and fell. Riley tumbled next to him on purpose, smacking a hand onto his chest twice.

“Haunted fucking houses, dear fucking god,” he said.

Catching his breath while crushing the irritable revenant beneath his frayed will, he said, “I have some gas in the trunk. I figured we’d probably need to take care of it.”

“Are you getting more psychic, or what,” Riley tried to joke.

Finding the path to the car, then returning to the plantation with canisters of gasoline and his matchbooks and lighters, ate another two hours. The sun had crossed to the edge of the sky overhead. Andrew poured gas around the crumbling foundations, steeling himself before hopping onto the veranda again.

“Come get me if I’m not back fast,” he said, then vaulted through the window to sprint for the library.

The land’s offer tugged at him as he splashed fuel across the lightless barren hell the Fultons had created, preparing to put the past to rest along with the books. Eddie had left him this, all of this, but keeping it—allowing its horror to continue to thrive for another generation—struck him to the core as wrong. He would get closure, by force if need be. When the can was empty, four more striding leaps back through the rotting house carried him outside, safe and hale. Together he and his roommate set a respectable fire at the foundations, flames licking hot and glowing into the homestead’s recesses.

The expansive, roaring catch of the fire dazzled them both with its ferocity and heat, as if it were burning off the contagion along with the aged wood and plaster. Fire wouldn’t cleanse the history from that earth, but maybe it could put the bones to rest.

Though within him, the haunt pressed at Andrew, unchanged.

Riley said, “I grabbed the ring from Sam’s. You still think you need it to do the rest?”

“Yeah, I do,” Andrew said.

The land seethed with death and need under his hands. He dug his fingers into the dirt, recalling the idea he’d had the night before. In his mind he turned the thought on end and breathed through the revenant’s instinctive resistance, waiting for that to pass, then held out a hand to Riley regardless when it didn’t. Impulse and Eddie’s damned memories told him symbolism was half the engine of magic. His roommate dropped the curse-tinged platinum band onto his palm. The revenant latched onto the metal it recognized in a heartbeat, despite its unwillingness to abandon him.

“This is yours,” he whispered inside himself and outside at once.

Riley remained at the edge of the conflagration, a safe but eerie distance as the wooden frame cracked and collapsed. Andrew walked into the woods with the fire at his back, casting his writhing shadow into the tree-shade. The sinkhole was closer than he remembered. His legs were longer now. Unnatural chill rose from the gaping edge, the entrance to the caverns and the site of his first death. Eddie’s, too. Andrew slipped the ring on and lifted it to his mouth. Metal stung his lips with cold. He urged the slithering weight of the haunt out of his flesh, cramming it into the band. Unpracticed though he was, Eddie had made him powerful—powerful enough to control a haunt, though he hated the idea of forcing him out. Come on. I love you, but this is no life. And, for once, it cooperated. His acquired memories slithered free with a mournful pang.